Lycoming College English professor Dr. Sascha Feinstein recently published his new book Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz & Literature (Indiana University Press). The book, available locally and on amazon.com, is a compilation of interviews on jazz and literature with some of America’s most important artists and writers from Feinstein's biannual publication Brilliant Corners.   Feinstein will be on hand for a book signing at Otto Book Store, located on West Fourth Street in Williamsport, from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, October 5. “When I started Brilliant Corners in 1996 I knew I wanted to end each issue with an interview because it would give me an opportunity to have someone known and engaging to talk about the relationship between jazz and language,” said Feinstein. “Some of the people I interviewed, frankly, are not as appreciated as they should be and their voices are important. I hope that scholars of jazz and jazz-related literature will turn to this book for many years to come.”

Craig Werner, Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, offered critical praise for the book: “Ask Me Now immediately becomes the single most important sourcebook on jazz poetics. The anthology is a kind of jazz symphony, a series of overlapping calls and responses that illuminate the most vital areas of the contemporary literary scene. Indispensable to students of American poetry, African American literature, aesthetics, and jazz.”

Artists featured in the book include Amiri Baraka, Hayden Carruth, Jayne Cortez, Bill Crow, Cornelius Eady, Gary Giddins, Lee Meitzen Grue, Fred Hersch, David Jauss, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Haki R. Madhubuti, William Matthews, Dan Morgenstern, Hank O’Neal, Eugene B. Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, John Sinclair, Al Young, and Paul Zimmer. 

Feinstein is Co-Director of the Creative Writing Program at the College. He is also the editor of Brilliant Corners, the only national literary journal dedicated to jazz-related literature. His next book, an essay collection titled Black Pearls: Improvisations on Recovered Memory, is forthcoming from Eastern Washington University Press.

Feinstein’s poetry collection, Misterioso (2000), won the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, and individual poems have appeared in publications such as American Poetry Review, North American Review, Georgia Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.

He is the author of two related critical books—Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present (1997) and A Bibliographic Guide to Jazz Poetry (1998)—and his essays have appeared in publications such as The Southern Review, African American Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. With Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, he co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and its companion volume The Second Set (1996).

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